Cookie Decorating Tips

Learn how to decorate cookies and work with royal icing in this video from EVERY DAY WITH RACHAEL RAY magazine. From our collection of Step by Step and Holiday cooking videos.

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Hi, I'm Tracey Seaman, the test kitchen director for Everyday with Rachael Ray Magazine. Today, I'm decorating some cookies and I wanna show you a few techniques that I really like. I'm working on some Christmas trees here. The dough is raw and chilled and they're almost ready to go into the oven. I have one more to finish. I have beaten egg white here. I'm gonna lightly brush the egg white onto the cookie. Egg white is great. It helps the sprinkles adhere and leaves a nice shiny finish on the baked cookie. Just give it a nice generous sprinkling of green sugar sprinkles and it's so easy and it's really great. The next technique I have is dipping in chocolate. I have some hearts that I've already been working on. This is melted semi-sweet chocolate and the chocolate is still warm. Simply pick up the cookie in tilt the bowl and swipe the cookie in the bowl to try to get as much chocolate as you can up the surface of the heart. Then I'm gonna scrape off any excess and lay the cookie down on parchment paper. And then the last technique I wanna show you involves royal icing, which is really fun to work with because you can make it any color you want. Now I've already started outlining these cookies. I have a plastic disposable pastry bag. You can use washable plastic bags or the waxy coated canvas bags. These I really like 'cause you can just throw them away when you're done. And you're gonna use your dominant hand to stir and then your other hand to help you stay nice and calm as you go around. I'm slightly above the surface of the cookie and I let the icing drop down onto the cookie, and I'm close to the edge but about 1/8 inch from the edge. So, these have dried. I'm gonna show you how to make flow icing to fill these. It takes about 20 minutes to a half hour depending on the humidity of your kitchen for the royal icing to dry on the outside. Now you wanna make this as easy as you can because it can get kind of messy. I have a nice tall heavy glass and another pastry bag with the wider tip put on the end of the bag. I'm gonna fold the top of the bag over because this will prevent any spillage out through the top of the bag. I have the plain white royal icing here. I'm just gonna add some water to it so it'll thin out a little bit and be easy to work with. I would just start out with a couple of tablespoons of water and stir it with your rubber spatula just until it gets slightly runny. It's a good idea to use royal icing soon after you make it or cover it with plastic wrap right on the surface 'cause you don't want a crispy skin to start forming or it'll jam up the tip of the pastry bag and that'll be bad. Everyone will cry especially you. So now, I have my glass that's nice and sturdy and I'm gonna pour this right in. Then you're gonna unfold the fold. This way everything is nice and neat in the bag because if I try to fill it with the tip up like that, I could get it all out on the outside and all over my hands and it would be hard to deal with. I'm just gonna twist up the end. As you could see, it's flowing easily out of the tip. Twist the end so that the icing doesn't come out. We're just gonna go around in a heart shape. Now I'm gonna take a toothpick and use it to spread the flow icing to the edge of the royal icing. That's it. Thanks for watching.